A team of scientists from the Swedish Museum of Natural History and elsewhere sequenced and analyzed the draft genome of a 35,000-year-old wolf from the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia, and found that this individual represents the most recent common ancestor of modern wolves and dogs.
Grey wolves. Image credit: Mr T HK / CC BY 2.0.
“Dogs may have been domesticated much earlier than is generally believed,” said Dr Love Dalén of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, senior author of the new findings appearing in the journal Current Biology.
“The only other explanation is that there was a major divergence between two wolf populations at that time, and one of these populations subsequently gave rise to all modern wolves.”
Dr Dalén and co-authors consider the second explanation less likely, since it would require that the second wolf population subsequently became extinct in the wild.
“It is still possible that a population of wolves remained relatively untamed but tracked human groups to a large degree, for a long time,” said study first author Dr Pontus Skoglund of Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.
The new findings suggest that the ancestors of modern-day dogs were separated from wolves before the last Ice Age – between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago.
Previous studies have suggested that the dog ancestors diverged from wolves no more than 16,000 years ago.
The current study also shows that modern-day Siberian Huskies and Greenland sled dogs share an unusually large number of genes with the ancient Taimyr wolf.
“We also find evidence of introgression from the archaic Taimyr wolf lineage into present-day dog breeds from northeast Siberia and Greenland, contributing between 1.4% and 27.3% of their ancestry,” the scientists said.
“This demonstrates that the ancestry of present-day dogs is derived from multiple regional wolf populations.”
“The power of DNA can provide direct evidence that a Siberian Husky you see walking down the street shares ancestry with a wolf that roamed Northern Siberia 35,000 years ago,” Dr Skoglund added.
“To put that in perspective, this wolf lived just a few thousand years after Neanderthals disappeared from Europe and modern humans started populating Europe and Asia.”
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Pontus Skoglund et al. Ancient Wolf Genome Reveals an Early Divergence of Domestic Dog Ancestors and Admixture into High-Latitude Breeds. Current Biology, published online May 21, 2015; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.019
